Yale-NUS professors publish in top journal Critical Inquiry

“Publication is the fruit of research,” mused Yale-NUS Associate Professor of Humanities (Literature) Andrew Hui. And bear fruit was exactly what he and Assistant Professor of Humanities (Literature) Ma Shaoling did, with their publications in Critical Inquiry. Founded in 1974 by Wayne Booth, Arthur Heiserman, and Sheldon Sacks, Critical Inquiry is known as one of “the most influential journals in the world”, by the Chicago Tribune. The journal seeks to present the most pioneering thought of the age while never losing sight of tradition.

Assoc Prof Hui and Asst Prof Ma have each published articles in 2022’s Spring and Autumn issues respectively. Assoc Prof Hui’s article, ‘Dreams of the Universal Library’ focuses on the acquisition of knowledge, specifically total knowledge in the form of the universal library. In the article, he focuses on Gottfried Leibniz’s book Theodicy, Jorge Borges’ short story The Library of Babel, and Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, discussing their varied takes on total knowledge. He traces the chronological development of perspectives on the universal library and its relation to the conflict between human freedom and omniscience.

Assoc Prof Hui is in general, “interested in the history of knowledge – what it is and how it is different from data, noise, information or wisdom”. This includes how people “conceptualise, store, preserve, circulate and fantasise about knowledge”, and attempts to “represent systems of things and words through microcosms and different models of scale.” From these general interests in knowledge, he developed the subject of his article. He stated, “Since we are all – every one of us – so extremely online, and the internet harbours illusions of omniscience, I’m interested in how thinkers have explored different fantasies of total knowledge and its horrors.”

On the other hand, Asst Prof Ma’s article, ‘Big Earths of China: Remotely Sensing Xinjiang along the Belt and Road,’ focused on the Uyghur repression and its relation to remote sensing, or the process of mapping the physical characteristics of an area by measuring its reflected and emitted radiation from a distance. She focused on online media platforms’ use of these technologies to track landscape changes in the Xinjiang Uyghur Administrative Region (XUAR) to find evidence for China’s construction of detention camps, and also looked at China’s own use of remote sensing technologies to, as she shares, “survey its own people and its environment.”

Asst Prof Ma’s work was directly influenced by the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. She was on study leave in Singapore when the pandemic lockdown happened, leaving her unable to travel to the People’s Republic of China for her research. She found herself “looking for ways to think about digital China online” and ended up following news of the Uyghur repression in Xinjiang. This led her to study remote sensing in relation to both media platforms and the Chinese government, specifically how both these groups used the technology to monitor the Uyghur people in different ways.

Assoc Prof Hui chose to publish in Critical Inquiry for its academic prestige, much befitting the epistemological subject matter of his piece. “Critical Inquiry is one of the top journals in the humanities. They publish some pretty cutting-edge thought, including leading voices such as Bruno Latour, Lauren Berlant, and Dipesh Chakrabarty,” he stated. Similarly, Asst Prof Ma followed Yale-NUS Professor of Humanities (Literature) Rajeev Patke’s suggestion that she “aim high,” she chose to publish in the world’s top theory journal, to “reach a critical audience interested in theory’s role in our contemporary pursuit of both the Real and its dissolution.”

As with any publication, both professors seek to make an impact on their readers. Assoc Prof Hui hopes “people will read it and see how the urge to know persists in culture from the Library of Alexandria to Google Books.” On the other hand, Asst Prof Ma “hopes that the article will nuance current discussions of the PRC’s so-called “automated authoritarianism” and liberal Western discourses. It’s never a black-and-white dichotomy, and neither is scholarship so starkly clear-cut when it comes to taking a critical and oppositional stance. We are all complicit in some kind of “remote sensing.””

In retrospect, Asst Prof Ma would also like to thank Prof Patke for his encouragement, and the Critical Computational Bureau and the remote conference it held to give her feedback. She also thanked who were perhaps the most crucial group, “Of course my family for surviving the COVID-19 lockdown with me!”